One kind of nest that is common here is set so out in sight that none but a blind man could miss it, though from its color it might readily be passed as an old one, not worth investigation. I do not remember just how many I have seen,—half a dozen, it may be,—but I have never looked into one. They cannot be looked into, unless they are first torn to pieces.
I speak of the verdin’s nest. It is a marvel of workmanship: globular, or roughly so, with an entrance neatly roofed over well down on one side; constructed outwardly—I cannot speak beyond that, of course—of countless small thorny sticks, and in size and general color resembling a large paper-wasps’ nest. The bird, as I say, plants it in full sight, in a leafless cat’s-claw bush, by preference, though I have seen one beauty in a palo-verde tree.
My first one I was directed to by the outcries of the owner. The foolish thing—if she was foolish—actually went inside, and while there scolded me. She took it for granted, I suppose, that I had seen her go in, and was determined to let me know what she thought of such despicable espionage. As a matter of fact, I was busy just then with a rarer bird, and might have passed her pretty house unnoticed had she held her peace. But the verdin is a nervously loquacious body, and perhaps would rather talk than keep a secret. Such cases have been heard of. Whatever else we may say of her, she is an architect of something like genius.
A FLYCATCHER AND A SPARROW
I believe I have seen two of the oddest birds in Texas—the road-runner and the scissor-tailed flycatcher. The first was mentioned some time ago in these letters; the second I have but lately met with. When I was in San Antonio in January, he was absent for the winter. He would return, I was informed, shortly after the middle of March, and I have kept it fast in mind that I must stop here on my way home and make his acquaintance.
I knew he was odd, but he has turned out to be odder even than I supposed. Other places, other birds, as a matter of course, but surely this one, to use Emerson’s word, is the “otherest.” When I saw him first, in San Pedro Park (everything is saintly in the Southwest), I thought for an instant that I was looking at a bird which had seized a long string, or a strip of cloth, and was flying away with it to his nest. Seen more fully, he looked, I said to myself, like a Japanese kite, or some other outlandish plaything. Even now, when he has been in sight pretty constantly for five or six days, I can hardly say that he looks like a bird to me. His enormously long tail feathers are so fantastic, so almost grotesque! They render him a kind of monstrosity. One feels as if he had been made, not born; and some Oriental must have been the maker.
Yet if ever a bird was alive, he is. His spirits are effervescent and apparently inexhaustible. Few birds are noisier or more continually on the move. When six or eight scissor-tails meet for consultation in one small tree, even though it be in a cemetery, there are “great doings,” as the country phrase is. What the disturbance is all about, it is beyond me to tell, but it seems a reasonable assumption that it has to do somehow with questions of love and marriage. So far as I have noticed, such sessions do not last long. In the nature of things they cannot. The hubbub increases, the discussion, whatever its subject, waxes more and more animated, and then, of a sudden, the assembly breaks up (I was going to say explodes), and away fly the birds (and the birds’ tails), every one still contending for the last word.
But there is no need of six or eight to set the pot bubbling. Two are a plenty; and indeed I suspect that a single bird would have it out with himself rather than forego for an hour or two the excitement of a shindy. In temperament the scissor-tail, as well as I can determine, is own brother to the kingbird. As I said, he is brimming over with spirits. If he gave them no vent he would burst.
So after a few minutes of quietness, the calm that precedes the storm, he darts into the air, with vehement, mad gyrations, opening and shutting his tail feathers spasmodically, and uttering loud cries of one sort and another. Perhaps he flies straight upward, or as nearly so as possible (this is one of the kingbird’s tricks), and with tail outspread comes down headfirst like an arrow. He is like a creature full of wine, or like one beside himself. What he does, he has to do. There is no holding him in.
Sometimes, when there are two in the air together, and for anything I know at other times,—I tell what I have seen,—they utter most curious, hollow, throbbing, booming noises, such as one would never attribute to any bird of the flycatcher family. They utter them, I say, but I mean only that they make them. How they do it, whether with the throat, the wings, or the tail, is something I have yet to discover. The only book I have at hand makes no mention of such noises, and I was greatly taken aback when I heard them.